‘Predate humans’: Stone tools made 3.3mn years ago found in Kenya

A large stone tool is revealed amid the sediment at the Lomekwi excavation site next to Lake Turkana in Kenya. ( MPK-WTAP)

Archaeologists on a dig in Kenya made an unexpected discovery – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools that could disprove the theory that the Homo genus was the first to use such tools. The makers of the tools remain a mystery.

The findings have been
published in the journal Nature by a group of scientists,
including Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University
in New York. The paperlists149 stone artifacts, which were
discovered west of Lake Turkana in a remote region in northern
Kenya.

“We knew at the moment of discovery that they would be the
oldest stone tools in the world,” the Toronto Star quoted
Lewis as saying. “Once the geological analyses came back
later that year that in fact they were older than 3 million
years, we were even more astonished.”

The tools were likely used for both flaking and pounding. The
scientists behind the discovery believe that the tools could have
been used for activities like busting open logs to get to insects
and breaking nuts or tubers.

“The idea was that our lineage alone took the cognitive leap
of hitting stones together to strike off sharp flakes, and that
this was the foundation of our evolutionary success,”
Harmand told the Verge in an email.

The next big question the scientist face is who actually made the
tools. “The jury is out on that,” Lewis said. One of the
possibilities is, they were created by Homo genus not yet
discovered by science, he added. Other guesses include genera
outside the Homo branch like Australopithecus afarensis and
Kenyanthropus platyops.